Turn Your Commute Into an Entrepreneurial Classroom with These Resources

Let’s be honest here, as an entrepreneur your most valuable resource is your time. Time is money, time is energy, time is something that, once you lose, you can’t get back.

If you are busy juggling the 9 to 5 while building your business, you might be overlooking two blocks of time that could make a huge difference in your side hustle: your morning and evening commute. Each week, you might have anywhere from three to six hours of commuting to do.

That’s a lot of time that could be put to better use. Just ask Chris Strode who built Invoice2go while on the train to and from work.

Although for the non-app developers out there you can make the most out of your commute time by educating yourself. After all, knowledge is power. Shortcut your way to success by turning your commute into an entrepreneur classroom.

In this post, we’re going to look at a few resources you can use to make the best of your commute, whether you are driving or riding.

What You Need To Bring To The Entrepreneur Classroom

Like any other classroom make sure you bring all the required items and materials. While these aren’t all essential, you’ll find that without these you’ll have a much tougher time learning. So here’s the class materials for your entrepreneur classroom!

A smartphone or tablet. Technology has come leaps and bounds in the past twenty years, to the point where you can fit an entire library’s worth of information onto a handheld piece of plastic. Take advantage of it and make sure you have your studying materials all ready to go.

Headphones. If you commute by public transport, don’t be one of those people who has the volume turned up and disturbing other passengers. Find yourself a good pair and practice some good headphone etiquette and drown out all the distracting outside noise and focus on bettering yourself through education. If you drive, then replace this with a good ol AUX cord, or adapter, and crank the volume up to 11!

Consume Business Best Sellers In A Fraction Of The Time.

Audible is a great resource for those who want to consume abridged and full audio versions of popular business books. But for those who want to cut to the chase, there are book summaries.

Services like Blinkist, Soundview Executive, Business Book Summary, and getAbstract offer text-based and audio summaries of business books, from the classics to the latest New York Times best sellers. With book summaries, you could easily listen to five to ten (or more) book summaries in the time it takes you to listen to one full book.

Check out the YouTube channel Fight Mediocrity who summaries many bestselling books for entrepreneurs into easy, digestible, 7-10 minute videos. Perfect for the entrepreneurial classroom on the go.

You can also use these summaries as a preview for books you may want to listen to the full versions of. It can save you hours of time by allowing you to determine whether the lessons taught in the book are the ones you need for your business.

Get an audio converter to convert your videos to MP3.

Do you have some video training courses that you would love to consume, but just have not had the time to sit down and watch? Audio converters are the answer. Movavi has audio conversion software for both Windows PCs and Macs.

Audio conversion software allows you to convert video files into MP3 or other audio files so that you can put them on your smartphone and listen to them on the go. With exception to step-by-step video tutorials, you can listen to the audio-only versions of videos while commuting, doing housework, or performing other mundane tasks and get just about as much out of them.

Download Online Videos and Convert Them.

For all video types online except for YouTube (which we will discuss in the next section), you can use the Google Chrome Video Downloader Professional extension to download them to your computer. This extension can help you capture videos from video training you have purchased but are not able to download directly from the website. Although there aren’t any Google Chrome extensions that allow you to download videos off YouTube.

Once you’ve downloaded the videos, you can use your audio conversion software to convert them to MP3 and listen to them on the go. Note that this is only for your personal use – you do not want to get caught stealing videos from premium training courses and sharing them with others.

Remember that instructional videos, webinars, and training courses are all copyrighted material. No business will take it kindly if they find out you’ve been distributing their product for free.

Keep this extension in mind for other types of video you want to learn from, such as webinars, videos on sales pages from competitors that you want to beat with your own products or services, and other sites.

Convert YouTube videos to MP3.

Google has made YouTube videos hard to download, which is especially irritating since there are a lot of great videos for entrepreneurs on their network. Plus, a lot of videos from premium training courses are hosted on YouTube. Fortunately, there are a few services online that can help. One if them is ClipConverter.

If you can get the direct link to the YouTube video, you can enter it into ClipConverter and get it to convert the video into an MP3. For embedded YouTube videos on a web page, just click on the YouTube logo at the bottom right to see the video on YouTube and get the direct URL.

The only issue with this site (and similar ones) is when you click the download button after the video has been converted to MP3, you get hit by a lot of popup ads. To get around this, you can use the View Source option on your browser (for Google Chrome users, this is under the View > Developer menu). Then do a CTRL+F to find the MP3 file link on the page. Copy it and paste it in your browser’s address bar and the MP3 will download to your computer, sans any popups.

This is a great way to get videos like Google+ Hangout interviews, webinars saved on YouTube, interviews, Q&A sessions, how-tos, and much more. Since YouTube is the top video hosting network, chances are, you will find a YouTube video on anything you want to learn.

Download Podcast Interviews.

Last, but not least, do not forget about podcasts. Even though they are free, many are filled with valuable lessons you can use for your business. You can search for podcasts by experts in your niche, interviews with experts in your niche, and much more. You can download them to your Podcast app or download the MP3 versions (when available) to your audio player.

Right off the bat you can check out the Foundr Podcast right now to hear our exclusive interviews with top entrepreneurs, whether they share their own philosophies, lessons, and advice. You can even check out our last article where we got in contact with 13 other boss podcasters! Be sure to check that out if you’re looking for an awesome list of entrepreneur podcasts to listen to.

The key is to make sure you download them to your smartphone or mobile device. You do not want to cause an overage on your data by streaming a lot of audio on the go.

Bonus: Get a voice recording app on your smartphone.

One thing that can be a challenge when consuming business education by audio is note-taking. Without a book in hand, you have nothing to highlight. And while commuting, you will have a hard time writing things down.

This is where voice recording comes in handy. Look for apps that allow you to take notes by voice, like the Evernote app for iOS and Android. They will allow you to remember key lessons you learn and things you want to implement while listening to your audios on the go.

Conclusion

And there you have it. As you can see, there are a lot of ways to get valuable business education on the go. If you learn how to utilize your commute to educate yourself, you will get ahead in your own business faster by filling in the knowledge gaps. These resources will also ensure that every dollar you

invest in online training will go to good use, as you will no longer have an excuse not to consume the educational material you have paid for.

It’s very much innovative as well as professional classroom for the entrepreneur. Since the inceptions of the potential belongings in precise manner to do well in each stated approaches before mentioned guidelines are the perfect action plan for all. in that case this is an ample action plan improving the best approaches in setting the positive action plan for all the way.

Wow thank you for all who put forward Blinkist! Absolutely amazing app for consuming even more books 😀

Loved the tips shared as well, especially the Youtube channel with the ‘cliff notes’ version of great books!

I also do suggest a podcast app outside the one that comes standard. The one I have been using is called Overcast, it has an awesome smart feature that speeds up the conversations to skip over the silences in the podcast. Real time saver!

Great for anyone who wants to save a bit more time from the longer podcasts

Great tips! I’ve read about this from somewhere else. One thing I would like to also suggest is installing a podcast app. One that I am using right now that is free and allows me to listen to a lot of famous podcasts is called the “Stitcher” app.